Now, twenty feet below them, a single circular slab lay, a shimmering, complex rune highlighted in indigo across its even surface.
The man turned back to Alex, smirking coolly. “Lastly …” The man strode over to one of the black cloaks, who was holding an antiquated Latin-style scroll. He inspected the miniscule engravings for a moment, evidently translating word by word. “We need … blood …” He reached into his robe and pulled out a curved dagger. Still reading the inscription, he raised his arm and plunged it into the neck of another nearby black cloak.
The figure gave a low gurgle as scarlet blood spurted around the silver insertion. The corpse sagged to the wet ground.
Lucy screamed, and Jack gagged and vomited a little into the grass. Even the other black cloaks looked apprehensive at their leader’s impulsive murder.
“… blood … of an innocent,” the man finished. “Ah, well.” He kicked the body, and it rolled over the edge into the pit. “He can be the appetizer.”
There was a dull clunk as the corpse hit the bottom. Thin ribbons of corrosive steam, putrid blackness, snaked upwards from the chasm, accompanied by the sound of sizzling meat.
He rounded on Jack and Lucy, marching over to where they were held. He leered at them both—held as they were above the ground they were the same height as him. “I’m a generous sort of chap, so I’m going to leave it up to your would-be protector to decide. Who gets sacrificed?” He looked at Alex.
Alex tried again to wriggle out of his confine but to no avail. “If you dare touch either of them—”
“You’ll what? Wriggle at me? It’s either one dies, or they both die. You can choose to save a life or choose not to. It’s up to you. I may be wrong, but you’re one of those people who doesn’t want to see others die, yes?”
Alex snarled at him.
“So who’s it going to be? Netball player, complete with authentic scream action, or the gaunt teenager, malnourishment-related accessories not included?”
Alex didn’t answer.
The man drew his dagger out again and began swinging it between Jack and Lucy like a pendulum, getting closer each time. Both tried to move, but all they managed was to lean their heads back slightly.
Jack looked from Lucy to the dagger. She was past the point of screaming; now she was stunned into silence at the mesmerizing veer of the blade. He tried to speak. “Pick me—” He felt something invisible clamp over his mouth, muffling his voice.
“Hush,” the man whispered, raising a finger to where his mouth would be, “it’s not your turn. You get your question next round … providing you still have a tongue. Or a head.”
There was silence. Jack looked at Alex. He was staring at the dagger, his face a mask of indecision.
The dagger swung before Jack, so close that he felt the air ripple around his collar, then by Lucy and grazed her neck. It came back a second time, aimed deep at Jack’s jugular—
“No,” Alex shouted.
“We have a winner,” whooped the man. He lowered the dagger. “Girl, how many people have you murdered, tortured, stabbed, shot, psychologically damaged, or otherwise maimed?”
“None,” Lucy whimpered.
“How good of you.” He grabbed her by the throat and lifted her into the air. He raised the dagger in his right arm and switched his grip so the blade was pointing downwards.
Jack tried to cry out, but he couldn’t even whisper.
The man swung the blade in an arc, ready to strike—
“Wait,” Alex yelled.
The man paused and turned his head to look at him, the dagger halted in midswing.
Alex looked from Lucy’s terrified expression to the darkness of the hood. Jack could tell he was thinking fast. “Show us your face.”
The figure smiled again. “I suppose you’re thinking by looking me in the eye and appealing to my better nature you can stop this madness and bring me over to the side of goodness and justice, and then all evil in the world will vanish forever, and we’ll all go and have a tea party in a flowery forest grove with talking animals with names like Bertrand and Alice. Well, it won’t. The world’s cruel, Mr. Steele, and the sooner you understand that fact, the sooner you’ll see true reason. But then, why not try? Why not try and prove me wrong?”
The man reached down with his dagger hand and pulled the hood off his face. Sleek, shoulder-length hair framed a darkly handsome face with fierce blue eyes and a sadistically curved jawline. He looked only about forty, but in his eyes there burnt a light Jack immediately associated with madness—simultaneously old so as to have seen all the evils of the world in their worst form, but at the same time young, daring, and vicious.
“No?” the man said. He leaned closer to Alex. “Has it sunk in yet that you’re on your own? No grown-ups here to make it all better. This isn’t smoke and mirrors, boy. You aren’t about to wake up safe and sound. This is real. Nowhere is sacred, not even your hometown. Does it hurt, knowing what kind of place this world really is?”
Alex stared at him for a moment. He thought he had seen something in that face before, though he could not recall where or even if it was on this man. “What’s your name?”
“Icarus. And before you say anything, I appreciate the poetic significance. I chose it, after all—the second great overreacher after Prometheus in classical mythology, the one who aspired to the sun, the symbol of light and life in the ancient world, but ended tumbling down, scorched by the sublime nature of his own ambition, down into bottomless perdition, there to dwell in chains wrought by his daring grasp at the glory of immorality. Now, if we’re done with theatricality …”
He raised the dagger above his head, its vicious, entwined blade glinting in the red light of the eye above, its shimmering surface mirrored in his own pupils.
Lucy screamed again, louder this time. The thunder and wind still blasted over the hilltop. The cloaks of all the figures around rippled, wraithlike. The crescent moon now shone with purple light: from one angle, a hungry grin.
Alex writhed against the force that kept him bound, but again nothing happened. There was the sound of movement in the background, but Jack did not hear it. He was frozen with fear.
Then a bolt of blue light burst out of the darkness like an enraged beast. It struck one of the black cloaks squarely in the chest, sending him tumbling into the shadows.
Chapter VIII
counterattack
Icarus lowered the dagger and dropped Lucy, whirling around. All the black cloaks turned, searching for the source of the blast.
A moment later, a second shot exploded out of the gloom, narrowly missing another figure. The shock wave blasted her hood off—a dark-haired woman with sagging skin. Then another, which knocked the legs out from under a man to her right. The group abandoned their positions at the pit and drew closer around their leader. The purple light had faded from the moon.
Jack twisted his head and squinted into the dark. Out of the shadows, more figures appeared to be advancing up the hill from all sides. With no moonlight, they were semi-spectral, but a momentary flash of lightning silhouetted several against the obsidian sky. They were not swathed in ethereal cloaks, but one had some kind of rifle or heavy gun hoisted over its shoulder. In that moment, another threw out their arm, and a flash of crimson light burst out of it, spinning through the air like a throwing dagger and striking a heavily built black cloak in the shoulder. He shrieked and reeled off sideways.
Another burst of light, this time green, shot from the outstretched arm of one of the newcomers, swiftly dodged by one of the cloaks. A newcomer flicked her arms outwards and let loose the orb of golden fire that had been hovering between her palms.
However, Icarus was ready. He raised his arm in a lightning quick motion, and the air rippled around him as the fire was deflected to smoulder in the grass to his left.
Now, the black cloaks began to counterattack. The unhooded woman raised her hand and contorted it. Shiny black tendrils leapt from her fingertips to coil ar
ound the nearest figure like writhing serpents. A man, his face still hidden, made a motion like a karate chop through the air, and a wave of indigo energy panned out across the ground, tripping up two approaching newcomers. The hilltop dissolved into chaos—bursts of light being fired, absorbed, and deflected everywhere, augmented by the furious crackling of bullets.
The force suspending Jack released, and he collapsed to the grass, face-first. He moved his arm experimentally, and it worked. He searched around for his captor and saw him flinging crackling black bolts at one of the newcomers—a blonde girl in what looked like a Special Forces uniform of dark Kevlar and body armor. Icarus was nowhere to be seen, but Lucy was a few feet away, spluttering and choking.
He tried to stand, but a blast of red light shot directly over his head. Half-crouching, half-crawling, he made his way over to Lucy. “You okay?” he panted.
“No,” she gasped, grasping her throat. She had pink marks around her neck and cheeks where Icarus had held her up.
“What the hell’s going on? Who are these people?”
“I don’t know.” She looked more scared than he had ever seen her, but he saw in her face the same thing that was keeping him from denouncing this all as a hallucination: the impulse to stay alive.
If they survived this, Jack knew he would question whether what he was seeing here was actually real, but this was not the immediate issue. These lights, whatever they were, seemed to be hitting and hurting, and that was good enough for his adrenaline-induced brain.
“If they’re half as bad as this lot, we shouldn’t be sticking around. Let’s get out of here. Where’s Alex?” Jack looked around. After a moment’s searching, he saw him. He had jumped onto the crescent moon stone and was sparring with a tall and skeletally thin black cloak. He seemed to have abandoned the gun; it took Jack a second to register that what was rotating in his palms were shruriken-like discs of silver energy, which he was hurling at his opponent.
The black cloak deflected three in succession, but one caught him in the stomach, and he doubled over sharply, crumpling to the ground and rasping for breath.
Alex scanned the chaos and caught sight of Jack and Lucy. He smiled.
He’s actually enjoying himself, Jack thought, ducking a whistling wheel of violet flames. It was at that moment that he knew for certain that Alex hadn’t been anywhere near a mental hospital. He couldn’t help smiling himself. The last eighteen months melted away, and there they were again, the three of them in the orchard, sharing pizza and drinks that Alex had bought from the off-license down the road. Lucy had just said something funny, and they were all laughing. And there was Icarus, laughing along with them, cackling behind Alex, raising his knife …
Smoothly, almost artistically, Icarus slid his dagger into Alex’s back. The vision melted away as time turned to sludge, everything seemingly slowed to half rhythm. Jack saw Alex’s eyes widen, his mouth sag as he fell forward onto the hard stone.
Jack didn’t know what was going on. He did not see the blasts of energy shoot past him nor the duelling figures staggering in his wake. He did not feel himself running or the pain in his thighs as he dropped into the pit. He only knew that he wanted to cause Icarus as much pain as possible, and he didn’t care how he did it.
Then he stumbled and fell, and time returned to normal. Looking up, he ignored the searing pain in his knees, for what he saw filled him with dread. A column of impenetrable ebony smoke was forming behind Icarus, and, as if from all around, the black cloaks were diving into the pit towards it. They formed a circle—facing outwards around it—standing erect, but the bolts of bright energy shooting towards them from their attackers were fizzling out before they reached their targets. One by one, they replaced their hoods and held up their right hands, palm outwards. Purple thorn patterns traced over the veins, forming into twisting roses, wrapping themselves over the entire bodies and intertwining with the dark smoke. The black cloaks vanished, ghostlike, into the wall of darkness.
Icarus caught Jack’s eye. The blue there burned with satisfaction and malicious pleasure. Then he was gone into the blackness and Alex with him.
Jack’s gaze switched to the only remaining cloak, just in time to see one of those bolts of lightning arch down onto him. A burst of blinding light, agony, then darkness himself.
Jack came to very slowly, becoming firstly aware of the slight rumbling motion of what he was resting on and then the noise of the engine around him. He finally had the energy to open his eyes. He was staring through a pane of glass, looking at the passing scene of trees and countryside, barely visible by the illumination of amber road lights. He turned his head and flinched as pain exploded into his neck—it was blinding white; he couldn’t see; he could only feel again the surge of lightning that had coursed down his spine, setting every nerve alight.
As the pain receded, he became aware of where he was. He was sitting in the backseat of a small, grubby-looking car. Someone was watching him. In the front passenger seat was the girl in the Kevlar he had seen fighting earlier, now with a very out-of-place tan jacket over her body armor. She had short blonde hair and very blue eyes. She could have been only a few years older than Alex, if that.
“Are you okay?” she said. Her voice seemed strangely familiar.
“I’m alright,” Jack replied, massaging his neck.
“What did they hit you with?”
“What? Oh, this sort of black lightning bolt.”
The girl frowned. “You should be okay, I think …”
Jack thought about it. His memory was a bit fuzzy. There had been a crescent moon and a hyena-wolf creature and lots of brightly colored lights. And Alex. Then the full magnitude of what had just happened cascaded down to hit him like an avalanche.
“What’s going on?” he cried in a voice that was much higher than his usual one. He strained against the seat belt. “Who are you people? Where’s Lucy? What was that? Where are we? What happened to Alex?” He faltered. More memories crashed down. The knife. Alex falling. The purple patterns, then black smoke disappearing into the night. Icarus smiling at him. He punched the seat in front of him hard.
“Hey,” said a man’s heavily accented voice, “don’t do that.” For the first time, Jack became aware of the driver.
The girl looked at Jack sympathetically. “Calm down. It’s okay. We’ll tell you.”
“Gaby, we can’t—”
“Look what just happened to him. I think he deserves to know what’s going on.”
“Sardâr wouldn’t—”
“Well, Sardâr isn’t here, is he?” When the man didn’t answer, she continued more kindly. “My name’s Gaby, and this is Malik.”
The Indian-looking man driving nodded at them in the rearview mirror.
“We’re part of an organization called the Apollonians. I … we … help people, in a manner of speaking.”
“So you’re not with the Cult of Dionysus?”
“Us? No! Definitely not. Actually, the reason the Apollonians was founded was to—”
“Gaby …,” Malik grunted warningly, turning left at a roundabout.
“He needs to know—”
“Not that much.”
“Sorry about him,” Gaby said, regarding Malik coldly.
“What happened to Alex? Where’s Lucy?”
“Your friend—Lucy?—is safe. Don’t worry. You’ll be seeing her in just a few minutes. As for Alex, we’re not sure. He was obviously taken by the Cult, but we don’t know why yet. More to the point, what were you doing there?”
Jack quickly recounted the story from when he’d left school to their arrival at the orchard. He left out the part with the fox, although he wasn’t really sure why. Maybe they’d think he was mad, or maybe they’d take the crystal that the strange creature had given him. Alex had told him to keep it secret. As subtly as he could, he felt the string around his neck and tucked it lower under his now filthy school shirt.
“Right …,” Gaby said, exchanging a look with Mal
ik.
It was clear that they didn’t believe him. Through the haze of the headache, he felt a prick of annoyance that he was not being believed by two people who claimed to represent a secret organization that fought off demon-summoning sorcerers. “So, where are we going?”
“We surprised the Cult when we attacked,” explained Malik. “They got sloppy and didn’t keep their surveillance up. But they’ll return with reinforcements within hours. We need to get the two of you out of here. All our agents have taken different routes back to headquarters to throw off any trackers.”
They spent the remainder of the journey in silence. Jack wasn’t sure what to think. He could pass this whole experience off as a horrific nightmare and wake up in his bed tomorrow morning with everything unchanged, but it all seemed so real. And there was the matter of the fox. Just afterwards, he had thought that had been a hallucination or some trick. But then there was the hellhound, the crescent moon machine that changed the weather, and these two organizations that appeared to be able to create and throw energy at each other. What little he had paid attention to about waves and particles in physics seemed to completely contradict this. It was like something out of a surreal sci-fi film.
And then he had the crystal, and so did Alex. Where did that fit into all this? The fact that he was being driven somewhere by two complete strangers in the middle of the night barely registered on the scale of events. If they weren’t with the Cult of Dionysus—why should they be, having fought them off?—then he was content with them for now. And they said they were taking him to where Lucy was …
The White Fox Page 7
